The Mob Takes the Fifth

On the Fifth Amendment, selective memory, and a movement that wants its pound of flesh

I started getting texts and social media pings Wednesday morning before the hearing had even ended. Some people I know, some I don’t, people who sit in pews on Sunday, told me Anthony Fauci is a mass murderer. One said he needs to be hung by a certain part of his anatomy and beaten every day. Another said things I won’t reprint. These are self-professed Christians who believe they occupy some ethical or moral high ground in American life, and they were fantasizing about violence against an 85-year-old retired scientist for the crime of taking legal advice. Their rage was palpable.

But here is what actually happened in that room yesterday. Dr. Fauci appeared before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee under subpoena from its chairman, Sen. Rand Paul, who has spent years positioning himself as one of Fauci’s chief antagonists.¹ Minutes into a hearing that ended up stretching past two hours, Fauci invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination and repeated the same sentence more than one hundred times.¹ At one point Paul announced, “Let the record record that the witness has refused to answer whether there’s a folder in front of him based on his Fifth Amendment right.”¹

When Fauci’s attorney, David Schertler, tried to address the committee, Paul had him removed from the room by security.² The committee’s ranking Democrat, Gary Peters of Michigan, asked to hear from the lawyer and was refused his request.³ Paul closed by scheduling an August 5 vote on holding Fauci in contempt, and afterward floated the theory that a pardoned man may forfeit his Fifth Amendment protections, a theory he conceded has probably never been tested in court.⁴ Rand was big mad. Remember, this is the same Rand Paul who spent months criticizing Trump over tariffs and spending, a heresy that made him a villain to this exact crowd. Wednesday morning he became their avenging angel, of sorts. In this drama, the distance between traitor and hero is one hearing, apparently, and memory lasts exactly as long as the agenda requires.

The stagecraft involved here was more convoluted than what we saw during the hearing itself too. Days earlier, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced he had located Fauci’s personal diary on government servers after an eight-month search and handed it to Paul and Ron Johnson, who published more than 1,100 pages without telling Fauci they had it.⁵ Which is, by the way, apparent proof that this crowd can release documents and files when it suits them. Remember that the next time you are told certain other files simply cannot see daylight. An eight-month search. For a diary.

The people calling Fauci a purveyor of dangerous and deadly medical advice take their health cues from RFK Jr., a man whose whackadoodle theories about medicine we will get to shortly, because they are germane. What did this treasure trove of incriminating prose end up revealing? According to Céline Gounder of KFF, no new science, no admission of a lab leak, nothing that advances the origins question at all.⁶ It did reveal that Fauci found his celebrity flattering, that Barbra Streisand called him about boosters, and that he kept notes on his press coverage. Scandalous! If that constitutes a smoking gun, though, I’d wager every pastor’s journal in America qualifies as a felony charge.

And that, I think, explains the tenor of my Wednesday inbox. Ever since word of the diary and the hearing got out, these folks were primed for vindication, and more than that, for retribution against a man they have spent the better part of five years building into their sworn enemy. The diary gave them nothing they wanted. Nothing enrages a mob like an acquittal.

The pandemic response itself does merit honest review. That’s how we learn and do better. School closures ran too long in many places, early messaging on masks reversed itself and damaged public trust, the definitional games around gain-of-function research funding at NIH were lawyerly at best, and lawyerly answers from public health officials cost the whole field credibility it has still not recovered. That’s all perfectly legitimate criticism. A serious country would examine all of that with sworn testimony, document production, and conclusions that follow the evidence.

What happened on Wednesday was the opposite of that, however. Fauci said in his statement that Paul’s only purpose in subpoenaing him was to extract some answer, any answer, that could support Paul’s repeated public promises to see him prosecuted.⁷ This was never subtle. Paul then spent two hours proving him right, capped off with a threat of repercussions and a contempt vote. You cannot spend literally years telling television cameras that a man belongs in prison, subpoena him, and then act hurt when his lawyers treat you as a prosecutor rather than an objective fact-finder. Any competent attorney in America would have given the exact same advice Fauci received. The Fifth Amendment exists precisely for the citizen who is staring down a government official who has pre-announced the verdict. This is precisely what Paul did.

Which brings me to the thing that my Wednesday correspondents seem to have conveniently forgotten. In 2016, Donald Trump told a campaign crowd, “The mob takes the Fifth. If you’re innocent, why are you taking the Fifth Amendment?”⁸ Six years later, in a New York deposition, Trump invoked the Fifth more than 440 times across four hours and answered exactly one question, about his name.⁹ That deposition, for the record, came in the New York attorney general’s civil fraud investigation into whether he inflated his net worth by billions to obtain favorable loans,¹⁰ an investigation that ended with a judge ruling at trial that he had done exactly that, a finding that survived even when an appeals court later voided the half-billion-dollar penalty as excessive. His supporters characterized his silence as prudence and wisdom. They called it justifiable self-defense against an obvious witch hunt. Hmm.

Yesterday, the very same people watched Fauci do the same thing on identical legal reasoning, and reflexively concluded it points to fraud, lies and mass murder. The principle at work here is not a constitutional one. It is wholly tribal. The Fifth Amendment is wisdom when our guy invokes it and a clear confession when theirs does.

The case that Fauci lied to Congress rests on very much contested definitions of a research funding category, a genuine dispute that reasonable scientists still argue about. The case that Trump lies rests on the Washington Post fact-checking team’s documented tally of 30,573 false or misleading claims across a single term.¹¹ And that is just scratching the surface of his fact-checked distortions and blatant lies. If lying to the public disqualifies a man from trust, and perhaps it should, one of these figures has a real problem several orders of magnitude larger than the other. The people in my texts and social feed have chosen to burn the scientist and canonize the salesman, which suggests that lying was never really the issue at all.

Oh, and a word about expertise since so many of yesterday’s armchair virologists have strong opinions about immunology. If your medical training consists of Truth Social, Fox News, Facebook and a chip on your shoulder, you are more than welcome to your prescribed treatment plan. The man you trust over Fauci once stood at a White House podium and wondered aloud about whether disinfectant might be administered inside the body. His movement’s pharmacy of choice stocked livestock dewormer too. And the health secretary who spent eight months hunting Fauci’s diary? This is a man who claimed in more than one hundred public appearances that vaccines have poisoned an entire generation of American children, and who declared in a 2023 interview that no vaccine is safe and effective.¹² As secretary, he responded to a deadly measles outbreak in Texas by downplaying vaccination and endorsing unproven remedies like vitamin A.¹³ Measles cases have now hit a 35-year high on his watch.¹⁴ By all means, follow your own experts wherever they lead if that floats your boat. It would all be laughable if children weren’t dying of measles in 2026 though. Just spare me the lecture about who really endangers public health.

The rage I heard from some folks on Wednesday was nothing short of liturgical. It had the cadence of heresy-hunting, the old communal ritual where the tribe restores its purity by expelling one man and loading him with its sins. René Girard spent a career describing this mechanism, and he would have recognized what happened this week immediately. The community that cannot face its own pandemic grief, its own dead, its own complicity in all of it, resolves the cognitive dissonance by finding a single face to direct their hate toward. It works every time, and it has never once been true justice.

The last entry in the diary they seized, from December 2022, reads in part that “the far, extreme right and Qanon literally hate me.”¹⁵ By then two people had been arrested over credible threats to kill him.¹⁵ Paul and Kennedy spent eight months hunting for evidence of a villain. What they found, and published to the world without warning, was a tired old man recording the plain fact that a movement wanted him literally dead. Then that movement read it and proved him right by Wednesday afternoon.

And Wednesday’s proceedings will not be good enough for them. They will keep beating this drum until it produces a result they want, because what they want was never testimony or truth. They want their pound of flesh. They were made to wear masks once, poor things, and someone must pay for that indignity. They call what they’re after justice, and in fairness, they are using the word with real Christian Nationalist precision. Justice, in that theology, is purely punitive and retributive. Let the guilty pay. And guilt, in that theology, has nothing to do with crimes against humanity. It means failure to kiss the ring.

Endnotes

1. CNN, “Dr. Anthony Fauci repeatedly invokes the Fifth in dramatic Senate hearing about Covid pandemic,” July 29, 2026.

2. NBC News, “Anthony Fauci invokes Fifth Amendment right not to answer questions at GOP-led Covid hearing,” July 29, 2026.

3. NBC News live coverage, July 29–30, 2026.

4. STAT News, “Fauci, citing senator’s ‘unhinged obsession,’ pleads the Fifth,” July 29, 2026.

5. CNN, “Rand Paul releases Dr. Anthony Fauci’s diaries ahead of hearing showdown,” July 28, 2026.

6. The Hill, “Anthony Fauci set for tough Senate hearing on COVID-19 after release of diary,” July 28, 2026.

7. Time, “Fauci Pleads the Fifth at Senate Hearing on COVID,” July 29, 2026.

8. USA Today, “Donald Trump says he invoked 5th Amendment in deposition,” August 10, 2022 (2016 campaign remarks).

9. NBC News, “Trump invokes Fifth Amendment nearly 450 times in N.Y. AG’s civil probe,” August 10, 2022.

10. Trial ruling in New York v. Trump (Engoron, J.), February 16, 2024; CNN, “NY appeals court voids the nearly $500 million civil fraud penalty against Trump,” August 21, 2025 (penalty vacated as excessive; fraud liability upheld).

11. Washington Post Fact Checker database, final tally published January 2021.

12. AP/Yahoo News, coverage of RFK Jr. confirmation hearings, January 2025 (100+ appearances claim; 2023 podcast statement).

13. NBC News, “RFK Jr. spends his first month at HHS downplaying vaccines and targeting food additives,” March 2025.

14. The New Republic, “RFK Jr. Now Responsible for 35-Year Record High in Measles,” July 2026.

15. The Hill, “Rand Paul releases over a thousand pages